libui
Avalonia
libui | Avalonia | |
---|---|---|
22 | 258 | |
10,631 | 24,133 | |
- | 1.6% | |
0.0 | 9.9 | |
almost 2 years ago | 5 days ago | |
C | C# | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | MIT License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
libui
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Short history of all Windows UI frameworks and libraries
You can kind of see the desktop UI train wreck in real time here.
We started with simple stable APIs for a common look and feel. For a while these were evolved and made available in other languages. This was back when native apps were consistent and intuitive and you could… uhh… actually write and ship them without bundling giant runtimes or checking a huge compatibility matrix.
Then around 2012 the train rounds the bend and screeeeech it hits some bad track and starts to derail. UI starts trying to emulate the web, a terrible UI platform, and sane compositional UI libraries and APIs are abandoned in favor of XML soup.
Since this stuff is a trash fire, this is followed by multiple incompatible attempts to replace or fix this. Most of these are abandoned dead ends.
Meanwhile the dev community just said fuck it and went to Electron, creating today’s world where a “hello world” app with an OK button is hundreds of megabytes and has to load an entire private copy of a language runtime and rendering engine.
Versions of this comedy of errors have occurred on every other platform, and of course there has been little effort to create a cross platform UI API that’s sane beyond Qt (with its own problems) and dozens of half completed OSS projects.
So enjoy Electron I guess.
There was one sane human being who tried to do this a while ago:
https://github.com/andlabs/libui
It’s the only sane desktop UI project I’ve seen in almost 20 years, an attempt to create an actual cross platform common API. But it’s abandoned of course, likely too difficult for one dev and nobody is going to provide financial support for anything that sane.
Maybe AI will get good enough some day that we can use it to do a thing like that.
- BeeWare Toga v0.4.0 – A Python native, OS native GUI toolkit
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Is there no simple GUI library for pure C?
What about https://github.com/andlabs/libui
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Capy – Cross-platform library for making true native GUIs in Zig
Fantastic! This is similar to the C library `libui` since it also acts as a wrapper of native libraries of each platform.
If only there was a way to interface to these using some declarative minimal and highly opinionated programming language and paradigm...
https://github.com/andlabs/libui
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Mathematical Patterns
For the GUI you will need a library or framework that interacts with your specifiv operating system and allows you to create windows and a canvas to which you can draw. You could give libui a chance.
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libui-ng-sys: external FFI bindings for libui-ng
libui-ng is a cross-platform GUI library with native widgets written in C. It is based on an earlier, (currently) inactive project known as libui. While Rust bindings for libui have existed for years (see ui-sys and iui), there is no solution for the new libui-ng; libui-ng-sys aims to fill this role.
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What GUI library should I start with after learning C?
libui
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Not-gtk GUI Libs/frameworks for plain C
https://github.com/andlabs/libui is very nice, but unfortunately dead, if it serves your purpose consider using it, this is a fork under development https://github.com/libui-ng/libui-ng
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Ask HN: Is there any cross platform non native GUI written in C that looks good?
https://github.com/andlabs/libui
Better yet, it has excellent DSLs that make it possible to build desktop apps in a way similar to HTML, but much better due to keeping all code dynamic in one language (no static/dynamic multi-language separation/mixing dissonance):
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Usable cross-platform GUI?
Maybe a module that uses https://github.com/andlabs/libui or a light HTML renderer?
Avalonia
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The search for easier safe systems programming
WPF is not the best example of open source, as some components are still closed source. Though it only runs on Windows, a closed source operating system, so perhaps that is not so important.
https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/issues/2554
That said, there are cross platform, open source .NET UI frameworks out there, including one that is inspired by WPF:
https://avaloniaui.net/
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Industrial Controller? Windows or Linux?
You might also want to look at AvaloniaUI[0] for a cross platform .NET GUI library. It is similar to WPF but much nicer to work with.
[0] https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia
- Avalonia – Farewell to the .NET Foundation
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AvaloniaUI: Create Multi-Platform Apps with .NET
Production user here. There's no money gotchas. They're above reproach. In fact, I've received considerable free support from their devs on GitHub Issues [1].
The Avalonia business model is based on selling XPF, which runs WPF (Windows-only) apps on other platforms. That's very interesting to big corps with existing codebases.
See my comment [2]
[1] https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/issues
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246988#39249128
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.NET on Linux: What a Contrast
Yes, but the portable GUI frameworks by Microsoft themselves are generally not very good, and they tend to be abandoned after a couple of years.
Avalonia is developed outside of the Microsoft corporate madness and seems to be slowly becoming the defacto cross-platform framework because it is expected to last a bit longer than a manager's attention span: https://avaloniaui.net/
- Too many Mac apps are being built with Electron
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Ask HN: Do you have a problem you'd pay to have taken away?
Not my comment, but relevant here "The problem with compiling Skia to WASM is you'll lose any benefits of hardware graphics acceleration on the device."
(From https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/discussions/6831#disc... )
- Dezvoltare aplicatie desktop
- Ask HN: How to create web, mobile, and desktop apps from a single code base?
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.NET 8 – .NET Blog
It's a bit of a hit and miss as of today. CLI, back-end and natively compiled libraries (think dll/so/dylib or even .lib/.a - you can statically link NAOT binaries into other "unmanaged" code) work best, GUI - requires more work.
Avalonia[0] and MAUI[1] have known working templates with it, but YMMV.
[0] https://github.com/lixinyang123/AvaloniaAOT / https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia/ / honorable mention https://github.com/VincentH-Net/CSharpForMarkup
[1] https://github.com/dotnet/maui (try out with just true in csproj - it is known to work e.g. on iOS)
What are some alternatives?
imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies
Uno Platform - Build Mobile, Desktop and WebAssembly apps with C# and XAML. Today. Open source and professionally supported.
nuklear - A single-header ANSI C immediate mode cross-platform GUI library
Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) - .NET MAUI is the .NET Multi-platform App UI, a framework for building native device applications spanning mobile, tablet, and desktop.
wxWidgets - Cross-Platform C++ GUI Library
WPF - WPF is a .NET Core UI framework for building Windows desktop applications.
nana - a modern C++ GUI library
Eto.Forms - Cross platform GUI framework for desktop and mobile applications in .NET
ncurses - snapshots of ncurses - see https://invisible-island.net/personal/git-exports.html (no pull requests are accepted)
MahApps.Metro - A framework that allows developers to cobble together a better UI for their own WPF applications with minimal effort.
GTK+ - Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk
Gtk# - Gtk# is a Mono/.NET binding to the cross platform Gtk+ GUI toolkit and the foundation of most GUI apps built with Mono